"We think that you should just be able to message a business in
the same way that you message a friend," he told a packed room of
developers. “And you shouldn’t have to install a new app.”

Fast forward one year later, and chat bots — automated
software that responds to users' queries and carries out simple
tasks — have completely failed to take over the world.

Early Messenger bots
were plagued with bugs, and most of them still
don't have the ability to maintain a basic conversation. Even
Facebook's head of Messenger, David Marcus, admitted at a tech
conference last September that bots were "overhyped."

Hoping to have learned from some of its early mistakes
developing bots, Facebook is attempting to revive bots with a
slew of updates to Messenger announced at its developer
conference on Tuesday.

Facebook's new vision for chat bots is no longer focused
on direct, human-to-bot conversations. Instead, Facebook
wants bots to lurk in the background of the
conversations real people are having on Messenger, piping
up only when the bot can be of assistance (such as
playing a song or booking a restaurant reservation).

There's also a new discovery tab for finding businesses that can
be directly contacted on Messenger, along with another tab
dedicated to playing lightweight games in the app.

“Our goal was never to put bots out there and just have bots,"
Messenger's head of product, Stan Chudnovsky, told Business
Insider during a recent interview. “There was some sort of
miss in communication, where we spent a lot of time talking to
everybody about all of the things we are doing, but we haven’t
spent much time talking about why we are doing that."

Facebook is pushing bots is because it believes bots are the best
way for people to communicate with businesses, or to combine “the
white pages and yellow pages," as Chudnovsky put it.

Learning from M to make smarter bots

Facebook's new chat extensions can insert into
Messenger conversations. A new App Store-like Discover tab
highlights businesses with bots you can talk
to.Facebook

Chat bots were originally seen not only as a way for Facebook to
monetize Messenger, but a meaningful step towards the more
powerful, artificially-intelligent assistants being worked on by
Amazon, Apple, and other tech giants.

"The bots that succeed will be the ones that establish an
emotional connection with the user," Sam Mandel, the creator of
an early Messenger weather bot called Poncho that Facebook demoed
onstage last year, told Business Insider at the time.

Over the past year, Facebook has been quietly testing its own AI
assistant, dubbed M, inside Messenger. For a handful of beta
testers in California, M can complete tasks like "book me
dinner for two tonight at a nice Italian place" or "find me the
cheapest flight to Norway." The catch is that M still relies
on humans. The app uses a mix of Facebook employees and
artificial intelligence to complete tasks.

Facebook recently
gave M some new smarts, allowing the bot to
volunteer to help users with basic tasks, such
as sending a payment or sharing a person's location based on
their latest Messenger conversations. But that's just the
beginning, according to Chudnovsky.

“Think of it has a big AI layer that we are starting to plug in,"
he said. “All the data we have has been training it."

For now, Facebook's AI brain is relatively restrained in the
kinds of suggestions it can make, but Chudnovsky said the
goal is to eventually make a fully-fledged, 100% AI-powered
M assistant available to Messenger's 1.2 billion users. Facebook
wants its AI to make other bots smarter too: Messenger is already
testing a chat extension with Delivery.com that can automatically
insert itself into conversations and ask if someone wants to have
pizza delivered, for example.

Still no meaningful revenue in sight

Messenger Day is the app's
latest Snapchat clone.Twitter /
@longzheng

Even if Facebook is able to make bots appealing and more
discoverable with Tuesday's updates, Messenger has yet to find a
meaningful way to monetize its vast user base.

Facebook isn't charging businesses to create or host their bots
in Messenger, and it doesn't plan to take a cut of digital
payments in the app either.

For now, Messenger appears to be sticking to what Facebook knows
best: ads. The app recently
started testing News Feed-like ads in a couple of countries,
and it could start showing video ads in its Story-like Snapchat
clone, Messenger Day. Simple games like pool and chess are
increasingly popular in Messenger — 1.5 billion game sessions
have been played in Messenger over just the last 90 days, a
Facebook spokesperson said.

Facebook could one day charge businesses for payments made
through bots or just ramp up advertising in Messenger, but for
now, the company is hoping that bots will survive a second time
in the limelight.